Marco Fusinato: Noise & Capitalism

Marco Fusinato’s new work at Anna Schwartz deconstructs insurrectional pamphlets to explore the relationship between context and the transfer of information.

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Published on 08 September 2010

by Dan Rule

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There is a wrench in the system. A disturbance. The five, large-scale works – beautifully framed behind glass – that span the length of the bunker-like space at Anna Schwartz Gallery convey an attack on the very tropes that the institution and, indeed, the wider commercial art world inhabits.

Behind the glass, blown-up to a huge, easily readable format and presented in stunning, quadripartite configurations, are the ordered pages of insurrectional pamphlets. The Capitalist System sits alongside Privilege has its Price, the Artist has his Income and Why She Doesn’t Give a F * * k about Your Insurrection. Bia (in Greek) and Thesis on the Imaginary Party show a morass of text layered atop heroic photographs of riots and political actions.

The irony, it seems, is grand. But irony is not Marco Fusinato’s shtick. The Melbourne-based artist understands the works – gleaned from his personal collection of pamphlets and zines, which he has collected since his youth – as a simple transfer of information.

“I like the idea that they’re anti-copyright, that you can pass them around,” he muses. “It’s information that’s meant to be spread.”

“The nature of the pamphlet is that they’re for personal use; you read them alone,” continues Fusinato, who has forged a name working across countless contexts and disciplines, including an ongoing musical collaboration with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. “So I had this idea to make them more public and to take them out of the format of a pamphlet, which is personal, and blow them up to poster-size, to make them public.”

The longer the pamphlet, the more layers of directly transferred text (or “noise”) that crowd the works. It is an assault of information, some decipherable, some not. But its resonance remains clear.

“The pamphlets are primarily anti-capitalist,” says Fusinato, “but of course, framed and presented within a capitalist system and the structure of the gallery.”

“I’m essentially turning them into art objects, which raises a number of questions in itself.”